Zingtree Tags: self-service support tools

A knowledge base of articles and resources is often at the very heart of a customer support strategy. An effective knowledge base will house materials that can help customers self-solve, troubleshoot issues, and better understand the details about products/services without the hassle of calling up your company on the phone or waiting for someone to get back to you via email.

Your typical customer support knowledge base includes categories of articles, tutorials, guides, how-tos and other helpful materials that can help to break down your products and services, and other important processes. Presenting this kind of information as readily available, bite-sized pieces, consumers are better able to help themselves; and, in turn, become more loyal to your company. In fact, stud­ies show that self-service support is considered a good, useful idea to 75% of con­sumers – 91% of those said that they would use an online knowl­edge base if it were easy to find, con­ve­nient to use, and (most importantly) applic­a­ble to their needs.

Why Interactive is Better

Decision trees are the ultimate tool for creating interactive knowledge bases that can serve internal or external purposes. Set in an interactive environment that can be embedded into any website or page, decision trees are an ideal way to help customers without the need for live agents or long support articles. Interactive knowledge bases allow you to:

Make content more engaging and easy to absorb

Support frictionless data collection

Automate support efforts to save time and money

For companies who have deployed Zingtree, like Applian Technologies, an interactive knowledge base is saving an incredible amount of time and money on support efforts – in their case, implementing a decision tree-based knowledge base saves over 15 hours every week on support communications and $30,000 of valuable human resources.

Our own Zingtree knowledge base is fully-interactive and built within our decision tree platform. Take a look at it here, or a quick peek below:

Our Best Tips for Building a Knowlege Base

Getting up-and-running with an interactive knowledge base shouldn’t be a huge project if you already have basic support articles written out already. There are a few key tips we like to share with support teams to get them started with an effective, highly-optimized knowledge base.

Keep things as simple as possible, and provide concise questions and short answers. The short-and-sweet approach is largely appreciated by customers of all types, so it’s important to keep their time in mind when you craft up the copy for every support piece.Here’s an example of how not to write something:Q: Would you like to receive help on registration or product support?A1: I need help with RegistrationA2: I need help in Support.Here’s an example of how to clean it up for simplicity:Q: How can I help?A1: RegistrationA2: Support

Use visuals, videos, diagrams, GIFs, and other types of media where it would be helpful for customers. Using photo-based media and adding relevant videos to your questions is a great system for communicating more with limited space.

Collect customer data and feedback where it makes sense. With our decision tree platform, you can easily analyze where your customers are navigating to most on your knowledge base, where they are getting stuck, and even collect feedback on specific trees to make them better over time.